The Supreme Court should ignore calls to temporarily freeze EPA’s carbon rule for power plants, the Biden administration said in a brief filed Monday.
The justices are weighing whether to grant emergency stay requests from Republican-led states, industry and electric cooperatives, which are seeking to halt the rule as they challenge the agency’s authority to craft emissions limits for new gas and existing coal-fired power plants.
Granting their request would cause “irreparable harm to the government and the public by permitting irretrievable emissions of carbon dioxide,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court Monday.
“Climate change is the nation’s most pressing environmental challenge,” she wrote, adding that EPA’s rule targets fossil-fuel-fired power plants — “by far the largest” stationary sources of planet-warming emissions.
